


every single cut (awake too long)

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: o blessed gabriel, intercede for us [2]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alien Biology, Disaster Relief, F/M, Gen, Hospitals, Meatball Surgery, Post-Mass Effect 1, Religion, Sleep Deprivation, Surgery, and immediately begin speculating about the emergency response, and say 'time to watch a bunch of MASH and write about overcrowded hospitals', battle of the citadel, overuse of stimulants, who among us did not play the end of me1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 23:15:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17671976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: It’s been thirty-one galactic standard hours since the last of Sovereign crashed down from the Citadel Tower, and Commander Shepard is missing in action.Garrus is sent to find Shepard after Sovereign's destruction.  Even the Hero of the Citadel is just another pair of volunteer hands, when the casualties are this high.





	every single cut (awake too long)

**Author's Note:**

> *aggressively toggling ambulance sirens* KILLING THE BAD GUYS IS ONLY HALF THE BATTLE, Y'ALL, YOU ALSO HAVE TO SAVE LIVES AFTERWARD. My name is Star, I'm an EMT, and I have some Thoughts about the staging of the emergency response after Sovereign, namely that it was probably a _catastrophe._
> 
> All alien biology is wildly speculative and largely made up, but all information about vomeronasal organs is accurate to Earth snakes! I can't be trusted not to give aliens weird sensory stuff. Also, the title is from the Rise Against song Awake Too Long, which is. Very on point for this.

It’s been thirty-one galactic standard hours since the last of Sovereign crashed down from the Citadel Tower, and Commander Shepard is missing in action.

Garrus is more worried about it than he should be, maybe—after all, they know she’s alive, even if she’s not answering comms.  He saw her pull herself out of the debris himself, saw the way she forced her shoulders back and marched out of the ruined tower to face the soldiers waiting outside.  She stopped briefly back at the Normandy, too, before she vanished, to clap shoulders and share wild, relieved grins, and to haul Joker into a careful, fierce hug as she called him the best damn pilot anyone could ask for and he tried not to look too pleased.

It’s…very Shepard, to have made sure to see her soldiers and tell them how proud she was, but give the authorities the slip.

Chain of command is, admittedly, a little confused at the moment.  The Destiny Ascension is gone, with ten thousand lives aboard, and Garrus can remember with terrible clarity the moment when Shepard closed her eyes before she gave the order to abandon it.  He’s already heard whispers that she had chosen humanity over the Council.  He’s also punched two people for whispering it.  It was math, just math.  The cold calculus of war.  Ten thousand lives and the Council, or thousands more in the Alliance Fleet, the Fleet that was their only chance to destroy the Reaper at their gates.

It had been the only call, but it’s left chaos in its wake.

It’s not the military in charge now—no one’s military.  It’s the hospitals calling the shots.  No one can shout down a general like a doctor, and every hospital, clinic, and back-alley medigel dealer on the Citadel has stepped up like a champion.  Search and rescue is underway in the more damaged sectors of the Citadel—the reports are grim, Tayseri ward more or less obliterated by debris and several others breached to the cold vacuum of space hull-side—and the ships of the Fifth Fleet, their saviors, have been shuttling in their wounded for hours, every skycar commandeered as an ambulance.  They cancelled the standard dim night-cycle of the Citadel lights, so that it’s been brilliant daylight since the destruction of Sovereign, and it puts the mix-and-match of civilian and military bodies, red and blue and green blood, turians and asari and krogan and volus and human wounded, in stark relief.

The Citadel is in no danger of being destroyed, not today.  But it’s a maelstrom.  People are getting lost.  People are going missing.  There’s barely a system for where the wounded are being sent, save for “wherever there’s space,” and they ran out of space in the hospitals hours ago.  He’s passed four makeshift surgical wards in offices and apartments and markets, looking for Shepard.  Every one of them has been full of blood and sobbing and the loud, clipped voices of medics, doctors and nurses and fucking health inspectors, anyone who knows how to tie a bandage.  All he can think is that it will take a long time for these peoples’ loved ones to find them.

It should be Alenko, maybe, looking for Shepard—Garrus knows they had some kind of something, but reading the intricacies of human relationships are beyond him.  Turians aren’t a tactile bunch, as a rule, certainly not in public, and if he projects his own cultural standards onto the situation, Shepard, always up to let someone throw an arm around her shoulders or hug someone out of sheer relief that they were alive, was probably sleeping with half the Normandy.  Garrus is fairly certain that’s not true, so he’s taking the safer route of assuming absolutely nothing until he’s explicitly told otherwise.  Tali likes gossip, so he knows that Kaidan and Shepard had _something_ , but it must not have been as serious as he’d thought, if Alenko didn’t mind Garrus being the one to hunt her down.

On the other hand, it’s a known fact on board that Garrus has a talent for finding Shepard when she doesn’t necessarily want to be found, talking to her when she doesn’t care to be talked to, so he might be the best choice.

Besides, someone has to help head off the Alliance brass when they inevitably come hunting for their hero, and somehow Garrus suspects that Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, pride of the human biotics, will have more success than Garrus Vakarian, wayward C-Sec officer.

Garrus stops at his fifth slapdash surgical ward of the hour and flags down the first person whose hands are free.  It’s a turian—this ward seems to be mostly dextro, but he can see a handful of asari and a few humans mixed in.  The turian’s slate-grey plates are marked with the blue of the Latis colony, over her eyes and down to her jaw, a lighter, more harmless color than the blood-blue on Garrus’ face, and she’s dressed in cheap medic’s robes, the kind designed to be discarded as soon as they’re contaminated and replaced for the next patient.

“What do you need, Vakarian?” the turian demands, direct and sharp with urgency.  Garrus doesn’t take offense—her subvocals are strained as she strips off a pair of sterile gloves and pulls more out of a nearby box.  He doesn’t remember meeting her, isn’t sure how she knows his name.  “You don’t look injured.”

“I’m looking for my commander,” he says.  “A human woman, an Alliance officer with red hair.  She has a red stripe on her armor.”

“No redheads,” the nurse says.  She doesn’t question why a turian would be serving under a human for even a moment.  Spirits, Garrus loves medics.  “We’ve only got one person treating humans here, we’re not taking any more unless the other wards are over capacity.  They cleared out a whole deck of the holding bay near D-dock for the Alliance, though, your commander might be there.”

“Holding bay?”  She nods, and then her clear red eyes flicker over his shoulder, looking to something behind him.

“Good luck and get out, Vakarian,” she says, and Garrus does as she says just in time for a group of four humans to carry in a turian bleeding from a grisly wound to the shoulder, slung in a makeshift stretcher between them.

They’re civilians, he notices—not just the turian, the humans too.  That thought hurts too much to hold onto it, so he sets a direct line toward the nearest elevator and focuses on the issue at hand.

 The holding bay has been hastily cleared of as much cargo as possible, turning it into a vast open space covered with cots and a handful of stolen tables, curtains hung slapdash between operating theaters, and supplies and wounded shuffling in and out in a steady stream.  Garrus joins the column moving inside, ignoring the stares directed at him, and slips through the crowd to reach the main bay, where he can abuse his height advantage to scan everyone in sight.

He’s the only turian he can see, here, one of very few non-humans save for a couple of salarians and asari medics aiding the Alliance doctors, but frankly he’s got bigger problems than the handful of startled glances he’s catching.  So do they, evidently, because he’s only a point of interest for a few seconds before the attention shifts away, the channel of people parting around him like a rock in a stream.

Here is a problem Garrus did not foresee: he’s looking for red hair in a human surgical bay.

Turns out, any human with a head wound looks like a redhead.

It makes him a little sick, looking around.  He doesn’t have the same instinctive aversion to red blood that he does to blue, the inborn alarm of a species looking at their own blood and viscera spilled on the metal floor, but the red is _stark_.  It stands out when it’s fresh and goes an ugly dull brown as it dries, and his experience with Shepard and her habit of ending up in the medical bay didn’t prepare him for the way that a breath through his mouth carries such a strong taste of iron and copper that it almost makes him cough.  It clings to the roof of his mouth, permeates his senses like dye spreading through water, and it’s worse than any battlefield he’s ever stood on.

Garrus closes his mouth and presses his tongue against his palate in an attempt to block off the vomeronasal aperture there, and tries to breathe through his nose as he searches.

He spends fully ten minutes there before someone hesitates beside him and clears their throat.  He looks down and blinks twice before he realizes it’s one of the asari medics, her head cocked back to look up at him.  She’s small for an asari.  Shorter than Shepard by quite a bit.  That doesn’t stop her from staring him down like she’s about to biotic throw him right through the hull.

“Can I help you?” she asks, barely this side of belligerent.

“I’m looking for someone,” he says, and hunches his shoulders, to bring them closer to eye level without looking too much like he’s crouching down to talk to her.

“I don’t know if you missed the comm, but everyone’s looking for someone.  This is a surgery, not a meet and greet, and we kind of need the space, so either ask around or look somewhere else.”  Garrus feels himself bristle at that, but he’s too tired to maintain the irritation, running on probably over forty hours awake with only the most passing stop for food and stims, and his mandibles droop a little within a heartbeat.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and asari have better hearing than humans, just good enough that he can tell she picks up on the sudden down-pitch in his subvocals.  It makes the lines around her mouth soften a little.

“Who are you looking for?” she asks, a little quieter.  “I might have seen them.”

“Not a casualty.  I’m looking for a human woman, red hair, green eyes, about this tall.”  He holds a hand a few inches below his shoulder, more than a foot below his own height.  “She’s wearing Alliance N7 armor, with a red stripe on the shoulder.  She’s my commander.”

The asari makes one of those asari sounds, the ones that mean _you youngsters are so cute_ and generally get under Garrus’ skin, and she smiles a little.  “Turians.  Always so attached to your CO.  I haven’t seen her for a while--”

“But you _have_ seen her,” Garrus interrupts, straightening up.  Relief floods through him like the cool feeling of medigel hitting his system, almost enough to make him dizzy, almost enough to make him feel like he’s been drugged.  “Do you know where she went?”

“She came and took one of our doctors,” the asari says with a shrug.  “A human with silver hair.  I get why.  She’s a cross-species emergency specialist.  Not much point hoarding her here when most every Alliance ship is bringing a medic in with them.”

“Shepard came here and took Chakwas with her?  Where did they go?”

The asari’s eyes widen slightly at that.  “That’s Commander Shepard?  Goddess, I had no idea.”

“Where did they _go_?”

“I’m guessing Huerta.  They’re the nearest real hospital, the really bad cases are going there.  I think they took over the whole floor, plus some of the embassies.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Garrus says, and the asari smiles, a little.  He can hear his subvocals getting out of hand with the intensity of his gratitude, his voice flanging badly over the words.  She doesn’t call him out on it, though, doesn’t say anything else, just waves him off back toward the elevator.

Garrus is the only one in the elevator, shockingly—the Alliance is using the cargo elevator to shuttle their wounded down from the docking bay, so that they can bring stretchers without worrying too much about bumping their patients against the walls, and most of the wounded being transported out to other areas of the Citadel, including Huerta, are being taken by commandeered skycar.  Not many people are wandering the causeways.  It leaves him alone on the elevator, with a moment to rest his hand over his throat and wonder when, exactly, he got so used to being surrounded by dense human hearing that he lost control over his voice.

There’s no reason for him to feel so relieved that even an asari could read him like a book, just from finding Shepard’s trail.  It’s not like she’s _dead_.  If she has her armor undersuit on, that means she’s still wired up to the Normandy’s life sign monitoring system, and his visor would ping him if anyone—especially Shepard—had a sudden change in their life signs while the ship was monitoring them.  It’s not the most legal thing he’s ever done, but no one complains about his uncanny talent for knowing when someone’s gone down out of his sightline. 

Idly, as the elevator pings on the third floor, Garrus thinks that he should have done the job properly and convinced Tali to hack into the GPS signals in everyone’s armor, too.  It would have made this so much easier.

The point is, Garrus tells himself sternly, Shepard is his commander, and he might be a bad turian in more ways than he’s not, but no one ever accused him of being disloyal.  It’s perfectly reasonable that he’s relieved to have some idea of where the hell she’s gotten off to since Sovereign.  More than that, Shepard is his friend—maybe his _best_ friend in this whole mess of a galaxy—and since Garrus hasn’t slept in two days, she probably hasn’t either.

The elevator pings again, and slides open to admit him to the hospital floor.

Garrus makes it three steps before a salarian storms up to him.

“You do not look injured,” the salarian barks.  “We have no room for the well.  If you can’t help, get out.”

“I’m looking for--”

“We’re posting a list of those identified on the extranet,” the salarian says, and he’s smaller and slimmer than Garrus but by pure force of will, he forces Garrus to fall back a step.  The salarian’s secondary eyelids blink twice, quickly, and his voice is no kinder but somewhat leveler when he says, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to look there.”

“I’m looking for my commander,” Garrus repeats doggedly.  “Commander Shepard.  I heard she came here, with a human doctor, Chakwas.  I need to know if she’s still here.”

“Lots of humans here,” the salarian says.  His voice begins to take on that clipped, harried tone of a salarian under dire strain, shifting to zero copula with the stress of anxiety, and if Garrus had more energy, more sympathy, he might feel bad enough to ease off.  “Chakwas came with a human woman.  Red hair.  Still here.  That her?”

“Yes!”  Garrus takes a quick step right, and then slips left around the salarian when he falls for the feint.  “I need to check on her.  My XO sent me.”  A lie, but the sort of lie that no one will question, coming from a turian.

“Don’t touch anything!” the salarian shouts after him, and then Garrus is swallowed whole by the chaos of the hospital.

Every room stands open.  The reception area is divided into six haphazardly curtained operating theaters.  The inset aisle down the center is lined with cots, to the point that the benches have been moved and replaced, even the small space behind the receptionist’s desk occupied by a trio of tight-packed cots occupied by—Spirits—two human children, an asari girl no older than ten, and a turian even younger, probably around five.  The kids look mostly unhurt, but they’re sedated, and look like they fell asleep clinging to each other.  At the other end of the reception area, the doors are locked open, the other rooms transformed into still more surgeries, all the way back to the cargo elevator, where the dead are being taken away and the wounded are being brought up.

As Garrus stands there for a heartbeat, then two, too concerned about disrupting the frantic pace to move, a high alarm sounds from one of the operating theaters, and a human voice swears, just loud enough to be heard.

“Damn it,” Chakwas says fiercely, and the alarm cuts off.  Garrus is moving before he can think twice, and he has a view of her as she pulls a sheet over an asari, activating her omni-tool with the other hand.  “Time of death: nineteen-forty-nine.  Asari, name unknown.  Cause of death, suffocation due to spontaneous pneumothorax and systemic failure of secondary respiration.  Someone come take her.”

The salarian that tried to chase Garrus away is joined by a pair of humans, and they carry away the body while the salarian wipes down the table.

“Open surgical bed, unit three!” shouts a very familiar voice, one that cuts through the clamor like a bullet through paper, clean and effortless.  “Levo patient would be best!”

Garrus gets there before the next stretcher.

“Garrus,” Shepard says, blinking at him in surprise.  She’s still wearing her plain black Alliance-issue undersuit, but her armor has been replaced by a surgical gown, and her fiery hair is hidden under a cap.  She’s holding a tray ready for Chakwas to look over in her gloved hands, and she seems to take a long moment to recognize Garrus when he arrives. 

The circles under her eyes look like they’ve been carved in with a knife.

“Have you been here this whole time?” Garrus asks, because it’s the only thing that comes to mind.

“Not the whole time,” Shepard says, and shrugs one shoulder like that’s a sufficient answer.  “Sorry I wasn’t answering my comm.  Got kind of hectic.”

“Hold still,” Chakwas reprimands.  She doesn’t look much better than Shepard—if anything, marked with asari blood in several places and still wearing human red on her shoes, the genteel doctor looks almost ghoulish.  “Garrus, have you ever had any medical training?”

“Some,” Garrus says warily.  “Mandatory C-Sec curriculum.”

“Good enough.  We need help and we’re running low on people still on their feet,” Chakwas says, and gives Shepard a nod. 

Shepard sets down the tray carefully and rolls her neck.  “I’ve been playing surgical aide,” Shepard says, and hides a yawn in her fist.  “I’m sorry I didn’t come back to the Normandy.  Is the brass hassling Pressley?”

Garrus—needs to answer her.  He needs to.  But he can’t seem to think past—

Of course she’s been here.  Of course, after everything, Shepard walked out of her ship, walked away from the crowds of soldiers who would have worshipped her, and found the one place on the Citadel where people most needed help.  It’s drudge work, mech work, work that barely requires sentient hands, let alone _Shepard_ , but from the look of it, all the mechs are in use, and Shepard has steady hands and a strong stomach.  That must make her qualified, for this, the cleanup.

“Garrus?” Shepard repeats.

“I’m not sure,” Garrus admits.  “I was helping search the Tower, then looking for you.  What are you--”

“Have you slept?” Chakwas demands, peeling off her gloves in a neat little motion that ends with one balled up inside the other and dropping them by her feet into a biohazard bin.  She squints up at Garrus like she’s sizing him up for a fight.

“No,” Garrus says.

“Can you still work?  Normally I don’t tell people to abuse stimulants, but we need hands.  You don’t need to be at the top of your game.”

Garrus glances at Shepard again, at the grey-blue-black circles under her eyes and the weary way she fumbles a stim patch out of a pocket and slaps it onto the exposed skin at her neck.

“You don’t have to help,” Shepard says.  “The critical cases should start to peter out soon.  Most everyone who’s going to die will have managed it.”

“No, I’ll help,” Garrus says, straightening up under Shepard’s gaze.  Those glass green eyes, desaturated compared to a turian but somehow all the more piercing for it, pin his for a long moment, like a challenge, and then she nods.  “Who has dextro stims in this place?”

“The rallying cry of meatball surgeons through the ages,” Chakwas says with a tired laugh, and leans out of the makeshift unit to shout, “We need more coffee!  D and L, please!”

Garrus is halfway through pulling off his gauntlets and armored gloves when he pauses, cocking his head at her.  “What now?”

“Meatball surgery,” Chakwas is saying.  “It’s an old joke from Earth doctors, a couple centuries back.  Surgery where you’re working fast and underequipped.  Lots of casualties, not a lot of time.”

“The name?”

“Well,” Chakwas says, and spreads her hands.  They’re clean, under the gloves she’s pulled on to replace the previous pair, but her nimble human fingers show off the hospital, the blood and the bodies being carried away, as a human man is carried in to replace her dead asari patient.  “Because,” Chakwas says as she throws a box of turian-style gloves at Garrus and starts briskly cutting away the man’s clothing to expose a nasty chest wound.  Garrus can’t imagine how the man is still breathing.  “When things aren’t going well, they look like meatballs.”

That’s the last they speak for a while, save for a quick message that Garrus sends to the Normandy, that he’s found the Commander.  Someone walks up and slaps a stim patch onto his neck somewhere before the human man gets stitched up and sent away—it’s over-familiar, especially in turian culture, but Garrus’ hands are holding pressure where Chakwas tells him to, while Shepard’s steady hands hold back a panel of ribcage.  No one complains about a little over-familiarity.

The human is taken away, just as a turian lopes quickly into the room and announces that the lower end of Tayseri was finally cracked open and there’s a new wave coming in.  Serious wounded.  Brace themselves. 

Things get hazy for a while.  Blood and torn flesh, press here, hold there, get Shepard, her hands are smaller, pin them down until someone can get a sedative.  Garrus doesn’t register it when the smell of blood and viscera stops bothering him.  Chakwas is a machine, in her element, rattling out orders and calling for medications with the calm assurance of a general on the field, commanding Garrus and Shepard and a rotating cast of nurses and medics like fingers on a hand.

Sometimes the patients live. 

Sometimes they don’t.

When the river of wounded begins to die down to a mere trickle, it’s the same salarian who tried to run Garrus off who comes to find them.

“Next patient, please, Taron,” Chakwas says.  Her voice is starting to crack with overuse, but it sounds as alert and competent as ever, without a trace of the exhaustion engraved into the lines around her mouth and eyes.  Her hands aren’t even shaking, despite the fact that Garrus can see two separate stim patches on her skin.

“No more patients,” the salarian—Taron—says, and he sounds…impressed.  “Or, at least, no more patients for you.  Go sleep.  All three of you.”

“I’m good,” Shepard says.  It’s a blatant lie—she looks even worse than Chakwas, and she’s been favoring her right side badly for the last while—but she also seems completely prepared to keep going until she drops.

“No,” Taron says.  “Forty-two hours.  You’ve done enough.  If you don’t leave, I’ll have you escorted out.”

“I need to--”

“Shepard,” Garrus interrupts, because he can _see_ what she’s about to say.  “You’ve saved these people enough, for today.  You need to get your ribs looked at.”

“Commander,” Chakwas says, her voice _dripping_ disappointment.  “You swore to me you weren’t hurt.”

“I’m not,” Shepard says, but her will to resist seems to be flagging.  Chakwas arches an eyebrow, an odd human gesture that conveys an amount of skepticism that Garrus frankly envies, and Shepard must be as tired as she looks, because she cracks without more than a token scowl.  “I—put medigel on my ribs after Saren broke some of them,” she admits.  “But I think they’re still pretty fucked.”

“Of course they are,” Chakwas sighs.  She musters a smile for Taron and says, “Thank you.  I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow _night_ ,” Taron says, disapproving.  “Unless something goes wrong.  The hospital will comm you if you’re needed.  Otherwise, twenty hours rest.”  He smiles a little, amused, and says, “Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re not a doctor, Taron.”

“No,” he grants, blinking his secondary eyelids a few times wearily.  “But I’m sure I could find several to agree with me.”

“Shepard,” Garrus says again, in an undertone, while Chakwas makes a tired joke back to Taron.  Shepard turns to look up at him, and looks—so lost, for a moment, that Garrus forgets what he was about to say and settles for settling a hand on her shoulder and pulling her back, away from the others.  “Are you—what do you need, right now?”

“I’m—tired,” she admits, barely a breath.  “I’m too tired to deal with the brass.”

“Okay,” Garrus says.  “You can’t hide from them in this hospital forever.  They can’t spare the space for you, when you finally drop.”

“I know,” Shepard says, rubbing an ungloved hand over her forehead and digging the heel of it into the ridge of her brow.  He’s seen the motion before, usually shortly before she goes and takes something for a headache, but it looks hopelessly young on her right now.  “I just—once we leave.  I’ll have to deal with the rest of it.”

“The rest?”

Shepard makes a mute gesture, around and up, encompassing the entire Citadel.  “How many people died today, Garrus?” she asks, and her sure, confident voice has gone brittle.  Her clear green eyes are bloodshot and unfocused with exhaustion, and she presses her left hand to her broken ribs thoughtlessly, as if just breathing hurts her.  “How many of them died because of the calls I made?  The Ascension—ten thousand people.  I sacrificed them like a fucking chess piece, because I decided the mission mattered more.”

“Gabriel,” Garrus says, because her given name worked for him, before, when he was trying to get through to her when she was drunk and determined to hate herself over the deaths of her platoon.  This is a world away from the two of them drinking in the back room of a sketchy bar, and the part of Garrus that’s wired enough on stimulants to think about things like protocol idly considers how insubordinate he’s being, but—

“Gabriel,” he says again, and she looks up at him, her wild stare focusing slowly on his own eyes.  “You’re not going to solve any major ethical problems right now.  You need medigel, and painkillers, and sleep.  A _lot_ of it.  We’ll make sure you get it, before the brass shows up to get your report and give you some kind of award.  Stars?  Humans do stars, right?”

“Bronze Star.  Pretty sure they’ll try to slap me with something higher.  How’d you know that?”

Garrus knows because he looked up Shepard’s file, the unclassified Alliance one, after she told him about Akuze.  She was given the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for her actions there, for trying to save her squad and for going back to find the colonists after everything, and he’s done enough research to know that it’s nothing to scoff at.  Just below the Bronze Star.  He doesn’t say that, though.  Instead, he says, “If you had to guess one thing for the turian military to know about human customs, what else would it be?”

She laughs at that, just once, and then winces.  “Oh, ow.  Don’t make me laugh, my ribs are barely holding together.”

“Come on,” Garrus says, gesturing.  “Let’s go find your armor and then we can go back to the ship.”

Shepard’s lips quirk up just a bit.  “Okay, big guy.  You win.  But you’ll have to carry my armor, I think.”

“Actually,” Chakwas says, looking back at them.  “They’ve offered to loan us a skycar.”

“As long as Shepard isn’t driving.”

“I’m a great driver,” Shepard says through a yawn, and Chakwas smiles, tired.

“They will be providing a driver, hopefully one who has had fewer stimulants than we have.”

“Not hard, at this point,” Shepard mutters, but doesn’t argue.

Shepard doesn’t put up any more fight as she walks out of the hospital with them flanking her, drawn up as straight and sure in her borrowed hoodie and scrub pants as she ever is in her armor.  The hospital is calmer now, though still crowded, and the eyes of medics and alert patients alike track Shepard as she leaves, apparently realizing who they’ve had wandering their midst for the past two days.  Shepard smiles, tired but honest enough to hurt, when an asari comes up to her and grips her hands in silent gratitude.

Chakwas takes the front passenger seat of the skycar out of what Garrus strongly suspects is mercy—Shepard is fading fast, now that the immediate pressure to _act_ is off her shoulders, and the youngish salarian in the driver’s seat looks dangerously close to breathless awe.  Garrus folds himself in next to Shepard, taking a moment to regret a little bit that this is not one of the skycars designed to accommodate the taller races without some uncomfortable hunching, and sets her armor on the seat between them.  It’s packed neatly into a bag, of course, because even at her most scattered Shepard is never careless with her armor or her weapons, and she settles her hand on it with a small, grateful smile.

The skycar driver takes the long way around.  The endless column of skycars bearing new patients for the makeshift wards and the overcrowded hospital has started to ebb, but the Citadel cityscape is still crowded, too crowded for a direct line to the Normandy’s dock.  Instead of a five minute trip, it takes nearly half an hour, and by the time they come to a halt in the skycar bay of the dock, Shepard has all but collapsed in on herself.  Her eyes are closed and her breathing is shallow, and the hand still resting on her armor is curled loosely, all the tendons in her clever and numerous fingers lax.  Lacking animation, her face is grey with exhaustion, pale and haggard, until he can see faint spots he’s never noticed before scattered over her nose and cheekbones. 

Garrus has never, in all his time on the Normandy, known Shepard to sleep around a stranger.  He’s barely known her to sleep around her own squad, her own crew.  But if anyone has ever earned the right to pass out anywhere they please today, it’s certainly her, and the idea of reaching out to shake her awake is nearly physically painful.  Maybe they can convince this jittery salarian to do a few more laps, so that they don’t have to wake her.

He only realizes when Chakwas raps sharply on his armor that she’s speaking to him, standing outside the open door on his side of the car.

“I’m sorry?”

“Can you carry her, or are you hurt too?”  Garrus feels his browplates and fringe bristle in automatic alarm, and Chakwas, for the first time ever, scowls at him.  He’s never seen Chakwas scowl at anyone, not even Commander No-Really-Medigel-Will-Take-Care-Of-It Shepard.  “Don’t be like that.  Just because turians only get carried anywhere when they’re dying doesn’t mean us more fragile races don’t occasionally tote people around just to save them some trouble.  _I_ certainly can’t lift her.”

“Oh,” Garrus says.  He’s so tired that his vision is beginning to feather grey and crackled at the edges, too tired to even articulate to himself why he was concerned, but he gets out of the skycar and nods, letting Chakwas take Shepard’s armor and direct the driver to turn the car, so that Garrus can reach Shepard more easily.

Picking up a human is—challenging, but achievable.  Garrus feels clumsy with exhaustion, and every movement takes an extra beat as he places his hands carefully so as not to aggravate her ribs.  He ends up with her uninjured side pressed against his keelbone, one arm under her knees and the other cautiously wrapped around her shoulders, and she startles awake for a moment when he stands.

“Hm—what?”  Shepard’s eyes flash open, and she looks disoriented, alarmed, as if she’s struggling to understand where she is, why she’s further off the ground than usual.

“Is this—am I—am I hurting you?”  Garrus trips badly over the question.  He wants to reassure her.  He wants her to reassure _him_ , that he’s not crossing some irreparable line by following Chakwas’ orders.  He never wants to put her down, where she might wander off and get into more trouble.  He wants to collapse where he’s standing and sleep for a year.  It’s a bad combination, for coherent speech.

The disorientation doesn’t fade, but the alarm does, and Shepard makes a wordless noise as she tips her head against his shoulder wearily, braced between his pauldron and his cowl armor.  She loops her intact arm over his shoulder, hand tucked at the back of his neck, as if being carried like this is instinctive rather than strange.  Garrus clamps down on a sound building deep in his chest and determinedly ignores both the impulse to rumble soothingly and the feeling of her warm human hand on the sensitive skin at the nape of his neck.

“You’re fine,” she mutters.  “Just don’t drop me.”

He’s pretty sure she’s asleep again before they’re halfway down the skywalk to the Normandy’s berth—not just asleep, but absolutely limp with it.  He sympathizes.

“You’re back,” Alenko says as they walk onto the bridge, and his limited human vocal cords do a lot to get relief across, in the moment.  The bridge is nearly empty, just one technician running a diagnostic on the damage and Alenko, apparently posted on watch to keep an eye out for trouble.  Whether the others are still on board or they’ve found somewhere flat and stable on the Citadel, Garrus can’t really bring himself to care.  “Is she--”

“She’s exhausted and a bit of a fool, but she’ll be fine,” Chakwas says, striding down toward the elevator like she’s not on hour fuck-all of this day.  These days.  Having the Citadel lights still daylight-brilliant has skewed Garrus’ sense of time passing something fierce, but he dimly recalls that they’re technically on day three of ongoing alertness.

Sitting still in the car gave him the time to start coming down off the stims, and now he’s so tired he wants to lie down and die.  He’s being reminded that, while he doesn’t have any broken bones, he’s bruised to hell and definitely going to be in some pain once he finally gets some sleep. 

Garrus gives Alenko a nod, and follows the doctor down to the Normandy’s quiet med bay.

“Put her down here,” Chakwas commands, patting a bed, and Garrus does his level best to lay Shepard down gently without bumping the arm of the equipment stretching over the bed.  It jostles Shepard awake again, and this time she tries to sit up before Chakwas waves an omni-tool at her menacingly.  “Don’t you dare, Commander.  I’m going to set the osteo-regen cycle and you _will_ sleep here until it’s done.”

“I can--”

“You can choose whether you’re going to sleep or be sedated, Commander, but I outrank you on this.”

Shepard opens her mouth again, then shuts it and scrubs her hand over her face.  “Fair enough, Doc.  Do your worst and then get some sleep yourself.”

“Take your shirt and bra off.  This won’t hurt, it’ll just feel strange.”

“I know,” Shepard says, and clumsily fights free of the top half of her undersuit, folding it down around her waist so that she can strip off some other cropped elastic garment Garrus doesn’t know enough about humans to understand.  Leaning against a bed on the other side of the room in hopes of making sure his legs don’t fold up under him, it doesn’t occur to Garrus to look away until Shepard’s already lying back down, and he considers leaving for a moment but—

He would _really_ like a painkiller before he goes to sleep and all the soreness in his muscles has time to set, and if Shepard isn’t bothered, he’s not either.  Military life has its advantages, and general lack of physical modesty is among them.

Chakwas nods, businesslike, and positions the arm of some machine that, honestly, Garrus knows the name of and can usually rewire in his sleep.  Currently he’s struggling to remember things like the word _machine_ , though, so he doesn’t bother trying to pin down the precise name he’s forgotten.  Chakwas angles it over Shepard’s broken ribs, and Garrus’ gaze wanders over the bruising that’s gone technicolor there.  Humans are so fragile, like Chakwas said.  Shepard is the strongest person he knows, unstoppable, indomitable, like something out of a story he might have been told as a child, and yet—

Her bruises are a purple-black map to her wounds, a tidy outline for an enemy to know where to hit to do the most harm, spilling over her ribs, over her belly—open and exposed—over the tissue of her chest.  Even up to her collarbones, their elegant dip and curve interrupted by swelling that’s starting to show around her shoulder.  Half-dressed, stained skin and exhausted pallor thrown into merciless clarity by the white lights of the med bay, Shepard looks tired and delicate and _small_.

Spirits, Garrus was scared when she didn’t come out of the rubble, for those long and terrible seconds.

Chakwas types a series of commands into the interface on her omni-tool, and Shepard makes a small, annoyed noise as the osteo-regen cycle sets in.  Garrus doesn’t know how long it takes for human bones, but for turians it takes a long time to do full repairs, the kind of long time that’s best done in several stages rather than all at once.  Hopefully it will take long enough to keep Shepard asleep for a while—the tension is already seeping out of her again, as if just being horizontal is too compelling to resist.

Garrus shifts to sit properly on the bed supporting his hip, weary, and takes a deep breath, slow and steady through his mouth, focusing on the feeling of pressure as his lungs fill, and fill, and fill.  When he unconsciously touches the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth, Shepard’s scent, lingering on his armor and his cowl where her head rested, hits him hard and fast enough to drown out everything else, even the still-present reek of the hospital and all that blood.

Idly, thoughtlessly, he does it again.  If he concentrates, he can parse out the smell of metal and heat from her guns, and the antiseptic smell of the harsh hospital soap, and even the creeping sickly-sweet smell of the stims she’s been using to stay awake.  It leaves behind something sharp and living that’s just Shepard, something that reminds him vaguely of the smell of Palaven, right after the first rains of spring.  Of home.

It takes more effort than it should to banish the ridiculous notion from his brain, and he struggles to focus on Chakwas instead.

She has a strange look on her face as she brushes Shepard’s hair out of her face, the red strands duller than usual and tangled on the thin med bay pillow.  It takes Garrus a few long moments, as Chakwas finds a blanket and drapes it carefully over Shepard’s sleeping body, to put together the doctor’s thin-pressed lips and fixed eyes, and then he realizes that she’s trying not to cry.

He gets it.  Crying is, as far as he can tell, sort of like keening, and he’s so tired and shellshocked that letting out too sharp a breath makes him want to keen like a hurt, lost kid.  He doesn’t, because he’s better than that, and neither does Chakwas, but he can’t hold the impulse against her.

“How much do you know about human religion, Garrus?” Chakwas asks quietly, her hands braced on the edge of Shepard’s bed like she can’t hold herself up.  “Do you know who Gabriel is?”

“Not much,” Garrus admits, wondering where she’s going with this.  “Shepard mentioned that Gabriel was—some kind of spirit?”

“An angel,” Chakwas says.  “A—a messenger, of God.  In three of the most common Earth religions, Gabriel is an important angel.  I suppose a turian spirit would be a good analogy.  In Christianity, Gabriel is the archangel of mercy and revelation.  In Judaism, a cleansing force, someone sent to set things right.”  She hesitates.  “My family is Muslim,” she says.  “Muslims—we believe that the archangel Gabriel is a warrior.”

“A warrior?”

“Yes.  A figure who shows the truth to everyone near them, and who fights to defend it.”  Chakwas strokes Shepard’s hair again.  Her hands have finally started to set up a fine, exhausted tremor that shivers through her bones like a small seizure.  “It’s just—the name fits,” she murmurs.  “Gabriel Shepard.  Nothing else could have been more appropriate.”  She lingers for another long moment, and then Chakwas sniffs, dashing the back of her hand over her eyes.  “Goodness.  I’m sorry, Garrus, it’s the exhaustion getting to me.  I don’t mean to bore you with my maudlin thoughts about Earth theology.”

“Don’t worry about it, Doctor,” Garrus says, mustering the energy to flare his mandibles in a tired smile from somewhere.  “I’m too tired to get bored.”

That makes Chakwas chuckle.  “Well.  You and the commander are heroes, didn’t you hear?  You had better sleep so you can look the part tomorrow, when the brass finally catches up with you.”  She gestures to the bed he’s already sitting on, and Garrus realizes belatedly that he’s been listing dangerously to one side for some time now.  “You’re more than welcome to sleep in here.  I can get you another pillow so that your neck doesn’t hurt too much.”

The distance to his cot in the shuttle bay seems absolutely infinite. 

“I’d appreciate it,” Garrus admits.  “And—maybe a painkiller if you’ve got one.  I think I’ll be feeling pretty rough tomorrow.”

“We all will,” Chakwas says, but she produces another pillow—a sturdy turian-style one, even—and hands him a pair of tablets as she gestures for him to take his armor off.  Garrus fumbles with the latches until his breastplate seal opens with a soft noise, and then the rest comes off fairly easily, in a neat pile beside the bed.  It leaves him in his undersuit, but he’s too worn down to feel underdressed or vulnerable.

They beat Saren today.  Three days ago.  Whichever.  They beat a fucking _Reaper_.  They even lived through it.  Garrus will go back to caring about appearances another time, hopefully a time when he’s not so exhausted that he can feel every beat of his heart in his browplates.

“Garrus,” Chakwas says as he tips ungracefully over onto his side.  The feeling of lying down, even on an uncomfortable med bay bed, is the sweetest comfort he’s ever known, and he can’t force himself to form words.  Instead, he hums on a subvocal pitch he hopes the doctor can hear and blurrily forces himself to look toward her—it makes him aware that he still has his damn visor on, but taking it off seems like too much work.

Chakwas is on a bed, too, on her back, her silver hair pooled around her head and her hands clasped on her midsection.  She’s not looking at him.

“You didn’t have to help today,” she says.  “Neither did Shepard.”

“Of course we did,” Garrus mumbles, eyes slipping closed without his permission.

“You did not.  You went above and beyond your duty, and not in a way that any military will reward you for.  But I am—so grateful.”

Garrus hums again, and Chakwas must hit a command on her omni-tool that sends them into darkness.

In the dark, half-drunk on weariness and halfway to sleep, Garrus isn’t sure if he imagines Shepard’s voice, thick and muddled but as sure as ever.

“No point fighting if you don’t save anyone afterward,” Shepard says, or his dream of Shepard says.  “You’re welcome, Doc."

**Author's Note:**

> Mmm I did some arithmetic and, assuming that they were awake for about five GS hours pre-Sovereign (it's like noon-ish on Ilos, so), Garrus, Shepard, and Chakwas are all working on about forty-nine GS hours without sleep by the end of this, which about two and a half GS days, which is about _SIXTY-EIGHT EARTH HOURS._ While totally achievable with enough stimulants, and not unheard of in this sort of disaster-relief scenario--Chakwas in particular has almost certainly done this before--that is _a long time awake._ So if Garrus seems kind of obsessed with how tired he is toward the end of the whole affair...who could blame him.
> 
> If you want to talk to me about how the Citadel is underequipped for emergency response and should probably have addressed that after the _first_ Reaper, let alone the rest, you can find me [on Tumblr!](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/)


End file.
